Every time we took Charlotte to a Birthday party or event, she would gravitate to the play kitchen... and then wouldn't leave. Tim and I both knew we wanted to get her one for the house but simply did not want something plastic. I had toyed around with the idea of making one from an old TV stand... I even went as far as to track one down for $15 at our local Goodwill. At the last minute we changed our minds. We didn't want another heavy piece of furniture in the house either.
So, we decided to pick up Ikea's basic
Duktig play kitchen. However, we had NO intention of leaving it as is! The same day we brought the kitchen home, we headed out to Lowe's for supplies.
We knew we wanted to paint the kitchen, add a back splash and come up with someway to make a fridge. That is where my dad came in. We bought an
inexpensive shelving unit and asked him to make a door for it. We has a really hard time finding something that already had a door. Then we had fun with it! For the fridge, we painted the bottom portion in chalkboard paint. The freezer portion was coated in Magnetic paint. This was my first time using Magnetic paint... I purchased a quart of
Rust-Oleum Magnetic Primer. I was nervous because it seemed like it got pretty bad reviews overall and a lot of people complained it simply didn't work. While it isn't an easy product to work with... it does hold our magnets perfectly! My tips would be 1) use a brush/roller/ tray you are fine with throwing away after, 2) Have it professionally mixed just before using, 3) Use multiple thin coats ( we did somewhere between 5-7 coats), and 4) Stir, stir, stir between coats! I was nervous that adding a "top coat" like the product calls for would negate some of the magnetization but it held up just fine! Once everything was dry, we added some handles and attached the door.
The remainder of the Kitchen got a thin coat of primer and two thin coats of paint. It hard to see in the picture above but the paint is called Lazy Days from Valspar's Signature Kids Collection. We opted to only paint what was wooden. We left everything that was white originally, as is. The counter was sanded down ( there was some type of thin clear coat on top) and then given a few coats of Red Mahogany Stain and some spray poly.
Next we added under cabinet lighting. Yes you read that correctly... my daughters play kitchen has under cabinet lighting and my own kitchen does not. We use one of
these lights from Ikea we happened to have at home. The switch is on the side of the kitchen. I have to say, it is one of her favorite things about the kitchen! She loves turning the light on and off. The final thing to be added was the back splash. We used the same product we used on our
Kitchen Ceiling, just a different pattern. We attached it on the back with the staple gun and left a small hole in the corner to feed out the wire for our under cabinet lighting. Oh and the knobs.... this was more of a struggle than I would like to admit. We could not find real oven knobs small to fit this space. We ended up painting regular black wooden knobs and adding white stripes. We added a washer behind them so they do spin. And this is what the final product looked like.
She LOVES it and plays with it everyday. We picked up the utensil and pots at Ikea too. We purchased the food from Amazon since most of the playfood at Ikea is plush and we wanted plastic. So while we might of spent more than we would have on a generic plastic kids kitchen set at the toy store, we LOVE the way it turned out and that it blends in with the rest of our house.
